Class Notes: Brooke Morales’ Windowscapes & Building a Sustainable Daily Practice

I finished Brooke Morales’ Windowscapes class! The four-session class focused on teaching skills useful in painting skies, such as matching the sky’s blue, different ways of painting clouds, and leaving-white methods for clouds/sky/stars.

These skills give students the basis to take on a project similar to Brookes’ 1001 Skies. For over three years, Brooke painted a small, Post-it sized swatch of the sky, just the sky, as painted from the window at about the same time each morning.

In her follow-up email to the class, Brooke describes the goal of the class and the value of the windowscapes project this way:

I created this course in the hope that it offers you one more way to connect with nature while building a sustainable nature journaling and watercolor habit.

While painting daily windowscapes helped me become a better watercolorist, I value the practice most for how it has deepened my appreciation of the present moment and the connections I now notice between the hues in the sky and bigger changes in our climate. Each new swatch of the sky contributes to a growing log of abnormal temperature fluctuations, extreme weather events, wildfires, and changes to our air quality and environment. The more we pay attention to something–the more we really notice it–the more we begin to care about it and how it changes over time.

My daily skies

I did a daily morning sky in the style of the 365 Skies project every morning during the class, rounding up to 24 skies.

My first day presented a challenge as I got up in time for sunrise at 6:30 AM, and enjoyed a pink-tinged cloud! Sometimes I attempted but I think is mostly lost was the light outline of glowing cloud against a more muted sky below; I want to try that technique again when applicable.

The following day was completely foggy. Some skies are boring!

I enjoyed exploring other early-morning skies through the week.

Interesting that we seemed to see the same cloudless sky twice, three days apart, so they are aligned. I got plenty of cloud practice the rest of the days, fitting after the lesson on clouds. I got too precious and took too much time on day 3, so that my wet sky began to dry and led to hard edges.

In both of the cloudless blue-to-yellow skies, I found the yellow quite yellow so I used Hansa Yellow, but on the page it looks garish and unreal. Naples Yellow Deep always would have worked better, even when the sky looks very yellow.

More strange alignments: these six days saw two three-day cycles of blue sky with clouds / completely overcast white sky / mostly-cloudy. On the overcast days the temptation was to leave the sky blank and white, but there is always some very slight gradation or hue to the gray-white.

I really like the ethereal cloud I managed to get on November 27. The following day I really darkened the sky to get that crisp division between sky and cloud, and after that I experimented with lowering the chroma of the blue in the sky. The final day, December 2, it snowed, and the sky was a pure blue-gray.

Bonus! I kept going for another six days after the class.

Keys to a sustainable practice

Somehow, I found this practice much more sustainable than my previous attempts to do a sky of the day, such as in summer 2023 or one year ago. Here’s what has worked especially well for me this time:

• Small size. In previous attempts I have let my ambition get ahead of me and tried to make scenes that are too large or complex. Here, like Brooke, I divided my paper into squares using masking tape. A two- to three-inch square is a lot easier to fill in than a larger size, and it prevents me from becoming too ambitious. The sky only takes a few minutes and then I can move on with my day. A full-scale painting with layers cannot be done as a daily practice because they often require more than one day to complete!
• Nothing but the sky. In this practice I give myself permission to only do the sky. It’s true that I found when I painted the Distant Hillside that the landscape makes the sky, in that the context of the landscape adds a lot of information about the lighting conditions. But the landscape also tends to be much more detailed and time-consuming. Keeping it sky-only is simpler – and challenges me to see how much I can convey with only the sky.
• Same place/from a window. I had never tried actually doing windowscapes, and it really makes a difference. Working from life is just different from a photo; it feels more lively and real. But indoors is a lot easier than a field painting, as you don’t have to deal with weather. I also don’t have the “analysis paralysis” of choosing a view: it’s just whatever I can see from the window. It turns out that “no decisions” is absolutely crucial to a sustainable practice.
• Same time (relatively) each day. In previous attempts I have waited around to figure out when the most “interesting” sky occurs in the day, and I end up putting it off and not doing it. Keeping it to the same time also prevents me from making decisions. It also removes the critical, “editing” part of my brain that says “no” to things. It does not matter if the view is interesting. Sometimes the sky is just plain gray, and that’s fine. That’s a legitimate sky.
• First thing in the morning. The morning sky may not be as “interesting” as a sunset, especially if I don’t wake up near dawn, but I find it a lot easier to do a routine in the morning. Doing this little sky doesn’t take so much time that I have to wake up earlier, and starting the day with a bit of paint is a nice way to set a calm tone for the day.

As Brooke observed, the sky from a window is a truly accessible nature subject that you can nearly always find. I am on a first floor and while most of my windows point at buildings, one points at the street over which I can see a good chunk of sky. The cardinal directions are blocked by buildings – I never see a clear sunrise or sunset – but there is always some interest in the sky, even in the other directions (perhaps more so in a subtle way).

Anyway, I think I’ve got over the point of this being “interesting.” Anything is interesting the more you notice it.

What have I noticed?

Even in the short time I have been doing this, I have noticed some subtle changes in the sky as the season shifts from fall to winter. Sunrise is creeping later. Dropping temperatures lead to clearer, crisper skies.

It’s fun to do this in New England because it seems like our patterns of rain, clouds, and sun are quite quick and changeable compared to other climates. The odd juxtapositions in my skies – with seemingly identical ones right over each other – makes me wonder if it is a common for us to have a three-day cycle in the patterns of cloudiness or cloudlessness. The noticing has allowed me to get to the wondering, a la Jack Laws’ “I notice / I wonder / It reminds me of” framework.

I expect continuing this practice would allow me to notice much more and so I aim to keep going, even though I only really intended to do it for the class. It’s fun!

Technical Observations

• Brooke pointed out in class that you need to paint 30% darker than what you see because watercolor dries lighter. I struggle with this, especially in skies which seem so, so light in real life, but the repeated nature of daily practice is helping me to work on it with intention.
• Brooke warns to avoid double-diluting your paint by mixing up a perfect dilute color and then painting it wet-on-wet. Instead, she suggests you either work with pure color wet-on-wet or watery color on dry. I have found these tiny painting small enough that I can soften cloud edges in time, so it’s easier to work wet on dry than it would be on a larger painting.
• If I do choose to work wet-on-wet I often find it useful to make my first layer a watery golden-yellow underpainting, especially when the clouds appear warm in the early morning or evening sky.
• Even when a sky or a cloud or a shadow appears neutral white or gray, it can to emphasize the color undertone. Which shadows are bluer, more violet, more brown? Which highlights are pale yellow, or coral, or periwinkle?
• Skies don’t tend to have a lot of value contrast, which can make it difficult to differentiate objects and draw focus. I have begun to notice that it can help to emphasize chroma contrast. If the entire sky is pastel but I want the pink clouds to pop, it helps to make the base blue sky color more grayish than it really is. This especially helps when the pop colors are more glowing than I can possibly render in the medium. As hard as it is to accept, sometimes making one of the individual colors lesslifelike can make the overall scene more lifelike.